Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?" — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
All I'd ever heard my entire life in my family was, "Nobody wanted you, and we took you in." When you get that into your head at a tender age, you really feel like you are an unlovable human being,… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
We poets don't tend to be certain a lot. Much of our art is made out of our own uncertainty. And there is a… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
Korea's first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights-a pause along… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
There's a fragment that goes, "Some say the most beautiful thing in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. Others… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal. — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me. — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
Kenneth Rexroth took me under his wing for a brief period. I was fifteen years old, and I was smoking a lot of heroin… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained by… — Sam Hamill Copy Share Image
